. >> chris: before heading to hawaii for christmas the president laid out a new stripped down plan to avert the fiscal cliff. here is what it is. extend the bush tax cuts for people making less than $250,000. extend unemployment benefits for the 2 million people who will run out next month and delay the sequester of $110 billion in spending cuts next year. for all of the talk of $4 trillion in debt reduction this plan would only save $800 billion over ten years. senator conrad is that the best that washington can do over the next nine days and can you pass even that? >> look, chris, it may come to that but we can do better. and we should do better. this is an opportunity to do something that would be hugely important for the country. i mean my own belief is what we ought to do is take speaker boehner's last offer, the president's last offer, split the difference. that would be a package of about $2.6 trillion. you couple that with the $1.1 trillion that has already been done and that would be close to the $4 trillion we are needed to stablize the debt and to begin to bring it down and